Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/20/a-portrait-of-maria-butina-as.html
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Russian agents were observed outside the courtroom by journalists, presumably ready to whisk her off.
Not the presumption I’d make. Stay away from any wielding umbrellas.
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Maria keeps on butting in to American politics. She is a real buttina.
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Butina is singing like a canary for Mueller, oh to be a fly on the wall during those conversations.
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The only thing more stupid than putting one’s entire life on public display in social media is doing so when one is involved in dodgy activities.
Tim Kirby, who knew Butina there. "She is very libertarian, pro-American and pro-2nd Amendment
The second of those three descriptions is a bit of a stretch. She was “pro-American” only in the sense that America has insanely loose firearms laws compared to every other industrialised nation-state.
The evidence suggests that Butina truly believed in gun rights, not that she was running a counterfeit campaign.
If one is modeling oneself on and allying oneself with a corrupt and dishonest org like the NRA, a counterfeit campaign is what one will get, true believer or not.
She would eventually come to see Trump as a bridge between Russia and the United States – but he wasn’t her first choice for president.
“At the time, she was a Scott Walker fan,” said Kevin Boyd, who attended the FreedomFest conference that year.
Hey, it takes time from word to come down from the Kremlin who’s a mere Libertarian tool of the NRA and who’s a fully compromised asset willing to work with the NRA as a back-channel link to Russia.
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I’d truly love to see such a portrait done on me!
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We get gun demonstrations more frequently than we like, already.
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It is a big part of why I suspect she was crafting a persona. Using social media to make herself palatable to Ayn Rand fans. Only this time, using “gun rights” as bait. Making a persona and a past that would get her into the American gun culture with less suspicion.
Now that I mention Ayn Rand, I do wonder how much of her work was actually intended to discredit libertarianism, and backfired because libertarians are so self-centred that they are gullible tools in the end?
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I can see that, too. In the age of social media idiocy where everyone is creating fake versions of themselves, it would make sense for a covert agent to do the same in order to create her legend.
Rand was sincere. She was just operating from the simple-minded category error that all forms of socialism and welfare states were the equivalent of or a slippery slope to the Soviet version she’d fled earlier. That said, once she got started writing her books I’m sure that a bitter misanthrope like her did see most of the mopes who bought her books as suckers.
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Which circles back to the other idea of Ms. Butina thinking the gun nuts were also suckers, waiting to be fleeced. Politics or no, she did have a sweet thing going with fleecing the NRA rubes.
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The medievalist is a longtime supporter of edged weapons made with Damascus steel!
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007, we need you to investigate how many US officials in both the private and public sector that have been compromised and are now beholden to their Russian “contact” and are, thus, agents of influence?
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Bloody hell, M! That’s a franchise --I mean, assignment-- that could take decades! And you mentioned beauty pageants are involved? Right-ho, then!
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